It’s easy to loose sight of your good fortunes in life. From time to time, I work in a homeless shelter. Recently while there, I had a moment of clarity; I looked around & realized I wasn’t seeing people who had simply lived their lives in difficult positions, instead, I was in the presence of intelligent, educated, learned individuals who just met misfortune in life. A broken marriage, addiction, a business decision gone wrong, an injury that cost them their livelihood, even just a lack of family or friends to help when things spiral. There’s so many more possibilities. Some people would say poor personal decisions are the root. & that may be so, but who of us can see the future?
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There’s tons of inspirational stories about individuals who overcame hardship: birth defects, lost limbs, etc., but what occurred to me that day was how thin the line between the fortunate & the unfortunate is in our world.
It’s the simple things that are often so easily overlooked, essentially like a birthright, that matter the most in the grand scheme of things. Moreover, it’s easy to pay such blessings –because they are blessings –lip service instead of truly acknowledging how deeply, greatly, immensely your life would be different without them.
Being able to breathe without the support of an apparatus like those who suffer emphysema for example or were just born with a defect making it a non-option for them. Those who’s immune systems are so compromised, their lives are lived in physical isolation, in the construct of a bubble. Imagine the experience of those born in such conditions: to have no idea what it means to have uninhibited contact with another human being or a pet or just a tree! The blind, the deaf, those with learning disabilities. People whose skin is intolerant of sunlight. Those of us who are incapable of knowing the joy of raising their voice in song.
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It brings credence to the adage: “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”.
I think for those of us who’ve been born with all the ‘standard’ functions & parts, it’s an easy oversight to make because, well, we’ve never known what it’s like to get by without them!
Nothing in life is promised. We are all alike, yet different. Equally, our good fortunes are not all the same either. Best to appreciate what we have & work with those gifts & abilities than to forlorn what we don’t seem to have.
The same goes for what we choose to do with our lives. Our habits, our work, our passions, our dreams… They may not always work out the way we want them to, but if you can experience some form of them, & limit the effects of the pitfalls life invariably hits us with, doesn’t that make you lucky?
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